PrintApril 8, 2010
NYT Fibbing about Bibi
Helene Cooper, a Washington-based diplomatic correspondent, writes in the April 8 edition of the New York Times about Obama advisers pondering whether the President should offer his own peace plan to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict ("Weighing an Obama Plan To End a Mideast Logjam" page A10).
Stressing the difficulties of Mideast diplomacy, Cooper notes that when administration officials demanded a "freeze of Jewish settlements....Israel refused outright."
This is a demonstrable lie. There was no "outright refusal" by Prime Minister Netanyahu, who responded with a unilateral Israeli concession -- a 10-month moratorium of new construction in West Bank settlements -- a concession Secretary of State Clinton hailed as "unprecedented." This, after Netanyahu on his own already had decreed a total end to new settlements, a total end to expansion of existing settlements, and a total end to subsidies for home buyers in West Bank settlements.
Granted that Netanyahu didn't consent to Obama's full demand, which included a Jewish building freeze in East Jerusalem. But by no stretch of Cooper's twisted imagination was there an "outright refusal" by Bibi to the president's request, as Hillary Clinton made amply clear.
Cooper, however, seems intent on blaming only Netanyahu for lack of progress by Obama in getting the parties to the negotiating table, while ignoring Palestinian obstacles..
Having falsified Bibi's response to Obama's request for a settlement freeze, Cooper adds that Netanyahu, given that his governing coalition includes right-wing parties, "might be unwilling or politically unable to make a deal."
Well, he might or he might not. But what concessions -- past, present or future -- have been forthcoming from Mahmoud Abbas, who in response to Obama's demand to cease anti-Israel incitement, keeps glorifying suicide bombers and other terrorist killers?
When it comes to Palestinian impediments to a peace deal, Cooper is an equal-opportunity apologist. Not only does she ignore Abbas obstacles, she also ignores the real elephant in the peacemaking room -- Hamas, which rules Gaza with an iron grip and completely rejects any two-state solution because it doesn't comport with its Islamist agenda of eliminating Israel.
Unlike Cooper, her counterpart at the Washington Post, diplomatic correspondent Glenn Kessler, in filing his own dispatch on potential problems for Obama should he decide to try and impose his own peace plan on the parties, writes the following:
"A major stumbling block to any peace plan is 1.5 million people -- almost 40 percent of the Palestinian population -- live in the Gaza Strip, now controlled by the Hamas militant group, which rejects any peace talks as well as the very existence of Israel. That was not the situation when (Bill) Clinton offered his proposal (in 2000), which envisioned a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, joined by highways."
Cooper, while blind to current realities in Gaza, instead offers reassurances to Times readers about the feasibility of Obama resurrecting Bill Clinton's imitative -- "it's not rocket science."
Glenn Kessler, who's been on this diplomatic beat longer than Cooper, obviously could teach her a thing or two.
